


These Foolish Things

by randomling



Category: Firefly, Popslash
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairing, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-23
Updated: 2008-05-23
Packaged: 2017-10-11 05:32:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/108949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomling/pseuds/randomling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Justin gets lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Foolish Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maggie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggie/gifts).



_1\. Jasmine tea_

The first time they venture out of the shuttle, it's the middle of the night, after the others have gone to bed. That's no guarantee, of course. Mal has a habit of wandering Serenity's corridors after the lights go out, and Simon is often up late, burning a single light in the infirmary so he can stare at the stolen scan of his sister's brain. Still, it's as good a time as any, and after three days Justin is about to start climbing the walls of Inara's little bedchamber. But she wants to keep her secret a little while longer. The technical term, she supposes, is _stowaway_.

Justin stays a pace behind her the whole way from the shuttle to the kitchen, his eyes wide, taking in everything, like a small child in a house of horrors. At such close quarters she can feel the tremors in his body and hear the rasp of each nervous breath. She knows that he's terrified, and that, even after three days, he's reining it in for her. He's trying to be calm.

The kitchen is blissfully empty. She motions Justin to sit, and he does, still looking around him wonderingly, like he can't take it in. As she finds the makings of tea she keeps half an eye on him. The close-cut hair on his head is just starting to wriggle out into curls, and he hasn't shaved the day-or-so's stubble he had the day they met, which has grown out into a beard since. He's wearing a brown plaid shirt of Jayne's, pants that belong to Wash, and his own rubber-and-plastic shoes, the ones he hangs onto like a baby's security blanket. She stole - borrowed - a generous handful of clothes from the laundry yesterday.

He doesn't speak a word of Chinese.

"Would you like some tea?" she asks, and her voice seems to snap him back to reality, because he looks at her sharply.

"Um," he says. "Sure."

She reels off the list of teas she has, Chinese, Japanese and Indian, and gets all the way to the end of the list before realizing she really should have translated them into English. She's about to start the list again when he says, "Pinyin. That's jasmine, right?" It was the last one she mentioned.

"That's right," she says, and he smiles briefly. It's the first time he's smiled in hours, since they last made love. She smiles back before turning to pour hot water on the tea.

He thanks her when she sets the mug in front of him, but for a while he says nothing else, staring into the tea as it cools. Inara is comfortable with silence, but this silence is alive with Justin's fear and confusion. Slowly, tentatively, she reaches out to put one of her hands over one of his. His hands are huge. She strokes the back of his wrist gently with her thumb until he looks at her.

"I don't know what to do," he says eventually, and she can hear the frustration and exhaustion in his voice. It's taken him three days to say it aloud, but she understands. He's stuck here, out in space, three days from civilization, and even civilization is a world he doesn't know. He looks back into his tea, sighing.

"Little boy lost," she says.

That's enough for him to look back up at her, and this time his eyes are narrowed. "I'm not a little boy."

_2\. Bruises_

Justin keeps telling her that he's okay. And he probably is - the doctor gave him the all clear, and at least Zoe stepped in before Jayne did anything really awful. Inara's still shaking with anger, though, because Mal thought it was perfectly all right to set Jayne on her friend, her lover, her _guest._

Justin sits down heavily on the bed and beckons her over. She closes the door instead of going, aware that Mal can and probably will storm in at any time, ready to give her yet another piece of his mind. It's an empty gesture: there's no lock on the door that separates her life from the rest of the ship. That's probably symbolic of... something.

"C'mere," Justin says. His swollen lip distorts his voice, and she turns to look him in the face. There's a large purple bruise on his cheek, and another, smaller one on his temple. When she doesn't move, he changes the subject. "What did he mean? The captain guy. He said you can leave now, like you were already gonna go."

Inara doesn't answer. How can she explain? How can she describe her relationship with Mal, and with the others, how it's binding and powerful and sustaining and suffocating, all at the same time?

"Inara?" he says.

She doesn't join him on the bed, but sits opposite him, on the floor. "Yes," she says. "I'm leaving. Not because of you," she adds hastily. She's known for a long time, now. Weeks. She doesn't say that. Justin just nods, and she finds herself going on. "It's so odd," she says. "I can't explain. They're my family. Closer than family. But I have to leave."

She looks up at Justin, expecting to see bewilderment on his face, and what she actually sees is surprise. He says, "I know exactly what you mean."

They've known each other a week, and he's starting to look like a caveman, his beard developing noticeable curls as it grows out. It keeps shocking her, how they're the same in such unexpected ways. The first time she told him she wasn't a whore, he laughed, just the way she'd laughed with her sisters in the Companion House long ago. Now this.

Before she's figured out what to say next, there's a polite knock on the door. Not Mal, then. "_Qing jin,_" she calls. The door opens, and she turns towards it. "Hello, Wash."

"Hey," Wash says warmly. "Zoe tells me we have a guest on board." Inara smiles, because Mal used exactly the same phrase, _guest on board_, but his voice was dripping with sarcasm. There's no undertone to Wash's voice, no implication of anything but friendliness. "I thought you might wanna borrow some stuff." He looks Justin over, takes in the wild hair and borrowed clothes. "Like a razor, or something? Hey, aren't those my pants?"

_3\. Fingertips_

Inara wakes from troubled dreams to find Justin on his side next to her, watching her sleep. She's starting to wonder how long they can go on like this. Mal has reluctantly agreed to let Justin stay on, but Justin has to stay out of Mal's way, which means on board Inara's shuttle and not roaming Serenity. With Justin in the shuttle the whole time, Inara can't work, and without work, she can't live.

"Good morning," Justin says. He smiles and reaches for her hand, and she automatically rolls closer to him, wanting to feel his warmth. Justin generates more body heat than any other five men she knows.

She kisses him gently, and then she lets him make love to her, gentle and slow. He's not the best lover she's ever had, but he certainly knows a few things, and she likes to think she's shown him a few more. Their love-making is always pleasurable, anyway, and she loves curling up next to him afterwards, her head resting on his shoulder, tracing the lines of his abdominal muscles with her fingertips. It's been a month.

It's been years, since she had a regular lover like this. Shared living space. Had morning sex.

He holds her afterwards, and she decides to keep her eyes closed, letting herself doze through the dreamy afterglow. Soon she'll have to get up and get on the Cortex, see if there are clients on the next planet she can entertain in their own homes.

"I need a job," Justin says. He's using much the same tone Mal uses to talk about the Alliance. She knows enough about his life before this that she can't imagine him doing a regular job. Could he tend cattle, haul bales of hay, serve customers in a hardware store?

"Do you know anywhere that's hiring dancers?"

Inara thinks of the frontier planets they visit and the seedy joints that will hire men to dance. Run-down little shacks in the middle of nowhere and dank nightclubs in ghost towns. They're whorehouses, mostly. She pats Justin's stomach sleepily. "I'll take care of you."

"You shouldn't have to," Justin says. He stirs, like he wants to sit up, and she grabs his hand and sucks the very tip of his index finger into her mouth, teases with her tongue. "Hey," he says, laughing a little, "that's not fair."

Inara slides her mouth down to his second knuckle joint, hooks her leg over his, and suddenly he isn't laughing any more.

_4\. Sugar lumps_

"Do you trust him?" Inara asks.

Justin grins at her hugely and crunches a sugar cube in his mouth like it's a piece of candy. He's wearing the white T-shirt and soft pants he had on the day they met, and his borrowed clothes, washed and folded, are with the things Kaylee salvaged and Book bought for him, on the bed. "Of course I do," Justin says. "I've known the guy half my life. He's never seen me wrong."

She's standing to her full height, but of course he towers over her, still grinning. He's so full of excitement and enthusiasm that Inara can't help but feel her sadness at losing him is wrong. He's going home, at last, at long last. "Good luck," she says.

He snatches another sugar cube to hide the fact that he's hesitating. It was River who found them, in a store in town, and Inara bought a bag for River and a bag for herself, thinking of Justin and his incorrigible sweet tooth. While she was doing that, Justin was meeting Johnny and discovering that he did, after all, have a way home.

"I asked around," Justin says. "You were right - there is a Companion House here. It's on the other side of this moon, but that's no distance, huh?"

She looks at him. She doesn't want him to know how close she is to choking at the last minute.

"Do you need help packing up?" he asks. "Because you know I'm right. You have to do it. You knew that before you even met me, and that was six months ago, baby."

"I know," she says. She looks around her, and knows that it'll take her a while. Longer than Justin has. He has to do it, too. "I don't need help."

"Do you want help?" His grin's turned into a soft smile, now, diamond-white teeth and sparkling blue eyes. "I kinda owe you some."

"No," she says. "Go. Go on. Go home."

He hugs her. "Look me up in the history books."

"I'll miss you," she says. It's true.

"Don't," he says instantly, pulling back to look her in the eye. She knows what he means: it's not _don't say that_, but _don't miss me_, and after all of those conversations about love, and giving, and how moving on isn't the same as giving up, it's the right thing for him to say. They'll move on, and they won't have time to miss each other.

She loves him, all the same.

"Don't," Justin says again. He tastes of sugar when he kisses her goodbye.


End file.
